2013年1月31日 星期四

The Treachery of Translators

The Treachery of Translators

The
fact is, there were always going to be a lot of fish in “Vingt mille
lieues sous les mers.” When a publishing house commissioned me to
produce a new translation of Jules Verne’s 19th-century underwater epic,
I was confident of bringing a degree of joyous panache to the story of
Captain Nemo, his submarine, the Nautilus and that giant killer squid.
But I had forgotten about its systematic taxonomy of all the inhabitants
of the seven seas.
Somewhere around page 3 of “Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea,” I got this feeling that I was starting to drown
in fish. There are an awful lot of fish down there, and there were
possibly even more in the middle of the 19th century. Whereas my
ichthyological vocabulary, whether in French or English or indeed any
other language, was severely limited. The fish (and assorted oceanic
mammals), in other words, far outnumbered my linguistic resources. I now
know I should just have boned up on fish, the way any decent,
respectable translator would have done.
(Note
to the decent, respectable translator: I teach a college class on
translation but I accept your critique that I am long on theory and
short on practice.)
Instead I started counting how many pages
there were and calculating how much I was getting paid per fish. It
didn’t add up. I realize now that I should have switched to “Around the
World in Eighty Days” – there are far fewer fish in that one.

Jim Datz

My
brilliant translating career hit another high when a French publisher
invited me to translate Brigitte Bardot’s memoirs, “Initiales BB.” I had
written a memoir about my childhood obsession with Bardot, so I said
O.K. and suggested some modest revisions. It would have to be completely
re-written from top to bottom and I would definitely take out all those
exclamation marks. And I would put back in that affair with the English
guy after she married Gunter Sachs – she should never have left that
out! They took that as a “non.” Tant pis. All translators rewrite and rectify. Some even feel that they can do a better job of writing Bardot’s life than Bardot.
The
law of karma is as unforgiving in the realm of translation as in any
other and I was overdue for a taste of my own punishment. I had written a
book about surfing in Hawaii called “Walking on Water,” which was
eventually translated into Dutch. I had nothing to do with the
translation and was simply presented with a fait accompli. My command of
Dutch is negligible, but I thought I would test out “Lopen over water”
by reference to a metaphor that was, if not my greatest contribution to
literature, at least distinctively my own. There was a passage where I
was drowning, but not feeling too put out about it, and I had written:
“Death was warm and embracing like porridge.” I zeroed in on the
sentence, but I couldn’t find anything even closely related to porridge.
So I checked with a Dutch-speaking friend – could she tell me how the
translator had done it?
“You’d better sit down,” she said.
The
translator had not given my immortal metaphor the time of day. He had
the same kind of hang-up about porridge that I had about fish. He took a
shortcut right round it, passing seamlessly from the previous sentence
to the one following. The porridge had not been lost in translation; it
had been quite deliberately eradicated.
My first thought was to
get on the next plane to Amsterdam and go and knock on his door. Maybe I
could find some porridge and fling it in his face. My own
transgressions, over the years, have taught me to be more tolerant and
understanding. On the other hand, Herman, if you would like to put on
gloves and shorts, we can resolve this matter in the ring, anytime.
It
may have been this experience that caused me to write an article for a
British newspaper titled, “Translation Is Impossible.” I was supposed to
be reviewing a bunch of English-French dictionaries, but I happened to
cite the classic Groucho Marx joke, which goes (in one of its variants),
“You’re only as old as the woman you feel,” as an instance of the
untranslatable. At least as far as French is concerned. You need a verb,
“feel,” that functions both transitively and intransitively, and means
something like “caress” and “my current emotional status” all at once.
It doesn’t (so far as I know) exist in French. A couple of months later –
inevitably – some friend in Paris sent me “La Traduction Est
Impossible,” the French translation of my original article, which had
been published in a Paris magazine.
Naturally the first thing I
looked for was the translation of the Marxian pun. I was genuinely
interested – I really wanted to know how the translator had pulled it
off. And to think I had claimed it was impossible – I was about to be
proved wrong! But translation is always an interpretation. In this case,
the translator had written something like this, updating New York ’50s
sexist humor into ’90s Parisian political correctness: “Here is an
example of a sentence that is manifestly impossible to translate: ‘A man
is only as old as the woman he can feel inside of him trying to express
herself.’” So, in some sense, I felt vindicated, but also — as usual —
betrayed by a graduate from the school of translation.
In my
opinion, you don’t have to be mad to translate, but it probably helps.
Take, for instance, the case of the late, great Gilbert Adair. He was
translating into English the brilliant novel by Georges Perec, “La
Disparition” – a lipogram written entirely without the letter “e.” (I
had had a tentative go at eliminating the most frequently occurring
letter in both English and French and failed utterly.) Adair even
succeeded, for a while, in deleting “e” from his vocabulary. I met him
for tea in London, while he was in the midst of it, at the Savoy hotel
(it had to be the Savoy, not Claridge’s or the Grosvenor, obviously).
When a waitress came around and asked if he would like “tea or coffee,”
he frowned, gritted his teeth, and replied, “Lapsang souchong.”
Even his title is genius: “A Void”
(think about it: He not only avoided the “e’s” in “The Disappearance,”
but he also slipped in a dash of metaphysical angst and a cool play on
words). The lesson I learned from Adair, a really serious translator, is
this: You can’t get it right, so the only thing you can do is make it
better.

Andy Martin is the author of “The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus.” He teaches at Cambridge University.